In the past, maintenance and upgrading of electrical equipment stored in rack mountable systems in a central location has been extremely difficult because of the mounting arrangement and limited space available for the equipment. In many applications, including, for example, an arrangement for storing the various components of a computer server central station, the various components or subsystems and/or peripheral devices of the system are stored in a limited space area, in shelving units, to serve a larger area which includes individual desktop stations. While the desktop units are relatively accessible from the rear of the units to maintain or upgrade or troubleshoot the desktop unit, the same accessibility is usually not available with regard to the shelving of the system server and its components. The larger systems are relatively heavy and cumbersome and their mounting and shelving arrangements are therefore relatively stationary and bulky. When it is necessary to gain access to equipment components mounted in a shelving structure containing the server computer and its peripherals, it has been necessary in the past to do considerable disassembly of the component enclosures in order to access the back end of the system components. Server external drive peripheral connections and cables are located at the rear of such external drives, i.e. for tape, CD and floppy drives. This makes access to them, even after the cover is removed, difficult in most cases due to the presence of power supplies, boards, other external drives, and other various sheet metal and other plastic parts. The user is, in some cases, faced with having to make blind connections and in most cases, must navigate their hand through narrow sheetmetal openings.
Thus, there is a need for an improved shelving system and apparatus for housing computer server system components and peripherals which allows relatively easy and fast access to the connections in the rear of the shelved units for maintenance, upgrading and other purposes.